Former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson is among hundreds of investors ordered to pay back 20 times their investments in a tax avoidance scheme, per The Times (H/T theMirror).
Several celebrities are screaming bankruptcy after officials demanded that they fork out the various sums.
Ex-England managers Glenn Hoddle andSven-Goran Eriksson are reported to be among the 780 who invested £2.2bn into Eclipse. However, there's no evidence of any of the investors being in financial trouble, nor can it be proven that they knew how the scheme worked.
The Times claims that Eclipse went through a complex process of buying Hollywood blockbusters and then renting them to studios.
Now ordered to pay back, an investor who placed a £200k in a particular scheme would have to pay between £2bn an £4bn backwithin 90 days.
My God, imagine advising your client to invest in an eclipse scheme and seeing the headline in the times today
The investors in Eclipse Film Partners No 35 LLP sub-leasedDisney films Enchanted and Underdog to a studioafter buying collective rights to them.
Hard to feel sympathy for those caught in the eclipse 35 tax avoidance scheme being hit with £2-4m tax demands.
Former Newcastle United footballer Nolberto Solano and ex-Sainsbury's chairman Sir Peter Davis were also named in the report, and Nick Wood,an adviser who represents Eclipse investors, has claimed that over 700 of them would go bankrupt.
I think there will be people potentially jumping off bridges," he said.
The scheme is not thought to be illegal, though, and Eclipse are now seeking judicial review of the HMRC decision.
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